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What was the worst genocide?

Travis

Misanthrope of the Mountains
Travis
Joined
Mar 31, 2007
Messages
24,133
Obviously we could just count bodies and declare the highest number the worst but I think we should also consider other factors.

Speed and ferocity
Composition of perpetrators
Percentage of population killed
Torture and murder tactics


Taking these into account I think you could make a case for either Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge as being the two worst acts of genocide. Both were conducted against fellow countrymen. The Rwandan genocide happened with frightening speed. The purge conducted by the Khmer Rouge spread like a virus as they imprisoned and tortured more confessions out of victims with their most notorious prison only having 12 survivors out of 17000 who went in.

What do you think?
 
Travis said:
Obviously we could just count bodies and declare the highest number the worst but I think we should also consider other factors.

Speed and ferocity
Composition of perpetrators
Percentage of population killed
Torture and murder tactics


Taking these into account I think you could make a case for either Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge as being the two worst acts of genocide. Both were conducted against fellow countrymen. The Rwandan genocide happened with frightening speed. The purge conducted by the Khmer Rouge spread like a virus as they imprisoned and tortured more confessions out of victims with their most notorious prison only having 12 survivors out of 17000 who went in.

What do you think?
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I would say the Holocaust.
Even though Khmer Rouge and Rwanda were very, very bad, I think the Holocaust tops it.
And the reason is because the killings went about on an industial scale and with industrial methods. You could almost say that the killings (in the deathcamps) were Assembly line like killings.

That is what makes this genocide stand out above the others for me.

But answering this question is a bit like answering the question, which battle in the Great War, on the Western Front, was the worst ? Many answers and for all a case can be made.
 
Travis said:
The purge conducted by the Khmer Rouge spread like a virus as they imprisoned and tortured more confessions out of victims with their most notorious prison only having 12 survivors out of 17000 who went in.

What do you think?
Click to expand...
This from the Jewish Virtual Library.
Chelmno: Only two Jews survived.
Belzec: Two Jews survived - Rudolf Rader and Haim Hirshman.
Treblinka: Camp was razed on August 2, 1943. About 70 prisoners survived the war.
Sobibor: Approximately 50-70 Jews survived.
Majdanek: Liberated in July 1944. Approximately 12,000 prisoners greeted their liberators, but no Jews survived the camp.
Auschwitz: Liberated in January 1945. Only 1,200 people were still alive (additional 5,800 in Birkenau, 650 in Monowitz).
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And the numbers killed were vastly greater than 17,000 in each case.
 
Yes but the Khmer Rouge murdered 20% of their entire country. They put to death 1 out of every five people in their entire nation. Does any genocide compare in terms of such a large part of the population being killed?
 
I would say the Holocaust as well, especially when one includes the many non-Jews murdered the numbers are staggering. I think the Holocaust also stands out due to the incredible work that has been done in documenting what happened. I don't know if there are any other genocides where we have such extensive information of the details of the horrendous crimes that were committed every day for so many years.

The Cambodian genocide would be the only one that really comes close in my mind, and it is atrocious in a different way than the Holocaust - whereas the Holocaust was a systematic, industrialized extermination of the "undesireables", the Killing Fields seem to have been almost indiscriminate mass executions for almost any reason whatsoever. But in some ways I find that brutal, animalistic kind of genocide more comprehensible - the callous, calculated extermination that was the Holocaust I cannot even begin to wrap my head around.
 
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Travis said:
Yes but the Khmer Rouge murdered 20% of their entire country. They put to death 1 out of every five people in their entire nation. Does any genocide compare in terms of such a large part of the population being killed?
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Of 9,5 million jews in Europe (and 15,3 million in the world) in 1933, about 5,5 million were killed during the Holocaust. So I'm think the answer is yes.
 
The destruction of various New World groups would be up there. The Taino and Caribs were exterminated.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
I would say the Holocaust as well, especially when one includes the many non-Jews murdered the numbers are staggering. I think the Holocaust also stands out due to the incredible work that has been done in documenting what happened. I don't know if there are any other genocides where we have such extensive information of the details of the horrendous crimes that were committed every day for so many years.

The Cambodian genocide would be the only one that really comes close in my mind, and it is atrocious in a different way than the Holocaust - whereas the Holocaust was a systematic, industrialized extermination of the "undesireables", the Killing Fields seem to have been almost indiscriminate mass executions for almost any reason whatsoever. But in some ways I find that brutal, animalistic kind of genocide more comprehensible - the callous, calculated extermination that was the Holocaust I cannot even begin to wrap my head around.
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highlighted.
Exactly! That is precisely the reason why the Holocaust stands out amongst the other genocides.
 
erwinl said:
Of 9,5 million jews in Europe (and 15,3 million in the world) in 1933, about 5,5 million were killed during the Holocaust. So I'm think the answer is yes.
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Moreover, most of those who were not killed escaped death because they were not in, or had fled from, areas under Nazi control. they were in unoccupied regions of the USSR, or in the UK, or in Bulgaria which did not participate in the Holocaust.

The Khmer Rouge killed one in five of the population under their control. The Nazis killed the great majority of Jews under theirs.
 
Travis said:
Yes but the Khmer Rouge murdered 20% of their entire country. They put to death 1 out of every five people in their entire nation. Does any genocide compare in terms of such a large part of the population being killed?
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The genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal is I believe the only such event recorded in history they wiped an entire gene pool and culture from the face of the Earth :(
 
There is something very creepy to me about Rwanda, because of the way Hutu Power organizations methodically built up resentment against Tutsis, then suddenly brought it to a boil in an orgy of very bloody machete violence - neighbor vs. neighbor. And some Tutsi resignation to the horror makes it even creepier.

However I could use something other than sheer numbers to assign the No. 1 spot to the Holocaust as well.

Mao's Great Leap Forward is estimated to have killed up to 30M people, and many Chinese thought starvation was due to local factors - there had always been local famines - and not nationwide policy choices by Mao Zedong. He actually exported food at this time, as a propaganda ploy. He had people melt farming tools and woks into low-quality iron and steel in his rush to "industrialize." He wasn't stupid; he understood the consequences.
 
MG1962 said:
The genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal is I believe the only such event recorded in history they wiped an entire gene pool and culture from the face of the Earth :(
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Alas, no. Indigenous populations on islands with temperate climates did poorly during the age of European settlement. Apart from the Tasmanians, the Beothuk people of Newfoundland were entirely wiped out. The peoples of Tierra Del Fuego suffered a similar fate, being hunted down following the opening up of the land to European sheep farmers in the 1880s.
 
I dunno about largest, but I will vote for the massacre of Saxons by Charlemagne for being at the very least up there, based on relative population.

The total population estimated for Germany AND Scandinavia together in the late 7'th century was about 2 million people, and it would double to 4 million by the year 1000. In the early 8'th century, it's safe to take it closer to 2 than to 4. Of those, Saxony (not to be confused with the modern state of Saxony) was just a small part. I can't seem to find reliable estimates at the moment, but I'd say it can't have been more than a couple hundred thousand people at most.

Out of those, 4500 prisoners were executed after just one battle, pretty much for being the wrong religion.

To put it into modern perspective, imagine if some foreign power were to kill some 5-6 million Americans in one single day, for being the wrong religion. Yeah, that's the scale we're talking about.

Granted, it doesn't top the genocide of the Jews in WW2, or for that matter, the 16% population loss of Poland. Not saying it does. But, you know, it still strikes me as a horrific act. It ought to be somewhere in the top 10, is all I'm saying.

And people wonder why it rubs me the wrong way when I hear BS like that Xianity was spread with love, unlike <insert religion> which was spread with the sword...
 
The worst genocide by proportion is in my view,the British army and Tasmanian militia slaughter of the native tasmanians-they were wiped out,excepting the anglo-aboriginal mixed children. There are NO full Tasmanians left.
The majority were shot,starved or even tortured to death during the "black war". The few survivors were shoved on a dismal island where the went extinct while having "Christian love" shoved down there throats. While by numbers the Tasmanian genocide was small,by proportional losses it was the complete eradication of a at least 38,000 year old population.

The Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews,they failed. The turks tried to wipe out the Armenian Christians,they failed. The British army tried to wipe out the native Tasmanians,they did it.
 
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Travis said:
Obviously we could just count bodies and declare the highest number the worst but I think we should also consider other factors.

Speed and ferocity
Composition of perpetrators
Percentage of population killed
Torture and murder tactics


Taking these into account I think you could make a case for either Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge as being the two worst acts of genocide. Both were conducted against fellow countrymen. The Rwandan genocide happened with frightening speed. The purge conducted by the Khmer Rouge spread like a virus as they imprisoned and tortured more confessions out of victims with their most notorious prison only having 12 survivors out of 17000 who went in.

What do you think?
Click to expand...

There's also the distinction between ethnic cleansing style literal 'genocide' versus a regional pacification. For example, the Romans nearly wiped out the Gauls, but Gauls survivors within the empire's borders were not targetted.

We don't know enough about why the neandertals died out. If H.sap.sap. systematically killed them off, it could outrank the Holocaust in terms of percentage killed.
 
Then you have mass murder on that reaches the level of Genocide in terms of the number of people killed but was not aimed on exterminating an ethnic group.
What went on in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China certainly got near the Holocaust in terms of people murdered ,but technically might not be Genocide.
Although what happened in RUssia get murky since Stalin did target several ethnic groups as being too resistent to the Soviet State,the Ukranians in particular. Whether or not the Famine that killed off hundreds of thousands of Ukranians was an act of deliberate genocide or just incredibly callous policy remains a point of debate.
A little surprised it took this wrong for Uncle Joe to get mentioned,though.
 
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